inFamous

Sorry for the lack of article on Saturday; my last semester of college just started, and things have been a bit crazy.

Finally got around to playing inFamous.  I got it during the Welcome Back program and I've been playing other games since then, so I'm just now playing it.  And I am enjoying it quite a bit.

It's unpolished in a way one would expect of a game so ambitious and relatively old in the context of the PS3's life cycle.  My favorite glitch thus far was in the first sewer area when you heal a man, a woman opens the gate and comes through, then the man drops to his knees and yells about how awful life is while the woman looks like she's running, but she's just moving slightly next to the suffering man.  It looked like she was doing some sort of happy dance while this guy screamed in anguish.  I laughed.

From a storytelling perspective, it's an interesting experience in that it seems to put no real effort into character development, but sometimes it seems like it really wants to.  We see some development in Zeke, but only in a few specific little areas.  Cole's girlfriend seems to basically be a non-character, more of a plot device to motivate Cole and offer some quests than an actual character, and yet I think it was supposed to be a really happy moment when she forgives Cole for what happened (it happened like halfway through the game and was more than a little obvious, or I would have warned for spoilers).

This is the most common problem to plague gaming as a narrative medium; it doesn't want to take any more time than necessary to develop the narrative elements.  It'll try to do a good job communicating the plot, but characters take a long time to develop, and that can't be done in gameplay to the same extent that plot can, so in order to preserve the all-too-common "all action and gameplay, all the time" mindset, they develop the plot but don't give the characters their due attention.  Perhaps I'll write a full article on that at some point, but for now it's just an interesting thing I noticed in inFamous.